02/16/13

12th Annual Brubeck Festival Planned for March 18-23

University of the Pacific’s Brubeck Institute in Stockton, Calif., will present the 12th Annual Brubeck Festival, titled “Dave Brubeck Across Time,” March 18-23. The festival honors the late Brubeck’s legacy as a jazz giant and his Stockton roots. According to a press release, “The 2013 festival is a broad-based tribute to his legacy that covers the spectrum of jazz in its fullest expression: live concert performances ranging from jazz legends to local bands (in civic concert halls and college campuses as well as jazz clubs), a documentary film about jazz history, jazz education talks/symposia, the spiritually inspired works of Dave Brubeck, and the integration of street/community-based jazz events.”

Besides three major concerts—by trumpeter Tom Harrell’s quintet at San Joaquin Delta College on Thursday, March 21; by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, under the direction of trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, at the Bob Hope Theatre on Friday, March 22; and by the Brubeck Brothers Quartet at the University’s Faye Spanos Concert Hall on Saturday, March 23—the Festival will feature nightly performances at the Take 5 Jazz Club; talks by Marsalis, jazz composer and historian Gunther Schuller, and his son George Schuller; and a screening on the 19th of the rarely seen film Music Inn. On March 19, a documentary George Schuller co-produced about the School of Jazz at the Music Inn in Lenox, Mass., where his father was on the faculty. On the following day, George’s father Gunther Schuller will talk about Birth of the Cool, a series of 1949-1950 Miles Davis recordings on which Gunther Schuller played French horn, and host a performance of the album’s compositions played by the Brubeck Institute Jazz Quintet and others. Both he and Marsalis will speak at the symposium “Jazz Leadership Across Time” the next day.

Other festival events include “The French Quarter,” a New Orleans-inspired street fair on the afternoon of March 22 in front of the Bob Hope Theatre that will feature live music, jugglers, fortune-tellers, food, and the unveiling of a semi-permanent display of winning art in the Downtown Stockton Alliance’s “Brubeck’s Music Inspires My Imagination” contest, and the next afternoon’s Jazz on the Green on the University of the Pacific campus.